Be the Music: Something Worth Celebrating

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This morning, I opened an email from a dear friend, sharing a wonderfully raw and revelatory anecdote about the spiritual nature of the creative impulse. Remarkably, it came from Alan Arkin, who will be joining us this New Year’s at ISE3. It comes from his new book, An Improvised Life:

Some years ago, I did a film with Madeline Kahn. A lot of it was shot on location, and one day we found ourselves at a particularly beautiful spot overlooking a panoramic view of the Hudson Valley.

During a lull in the shooting, while the cameras were setting up, we went out onto an extensive lawn and sat there for a while, lost in the scenery. While we were musing and chatting, I found myself thinking about Madeline's many gifts. She was a fine actress, an excellent pianist; she had an exquisite operatic voice with impeccable technique and she was also a brilliant comedian.

I asked her which of her talents she considered to be her primary focus. She thought for a while and couldn't come up with an answer. I don't think she'd ever thought about it before.

"Well, what did you start out wanting to do?" I asked. "What was your first impulse? Was it acting?" She shook her head "no," but she didn't seem sure.

"Singing?"

"No."

"Playing the piano?"

"No."

"Did you want to be a comedian?"

"No, not really."

"Well, what was the first thing you thought of doing? There had to be something."

Again she tried to thread her way back to her childhood ambitions.

"I used to listen to a lot of music." She paused, trying to find the words for what she was thinking. "And that's what I wanted to be," she finally said.

"I don't know what you mean," I said.

She answered, and it sounded as if she'd never formulated this thought before, as if it was news to herself.

"I wanted to be the music," she said.

It was a revelatory and somewhat disturbing moment. With that one statement, I realized that what she'd said about herself was the impulse behind all of my own interests, all of my needs, all of my studying, compulsions and passions, and had I been aware of that idea when I was starting out, had I been able to assimilate it, live within it, I would have saved endless years of frustration and work and confusion because that thought was at the very bottom of what I was looking for. So much had been invested in craft, in externalization, in looking for something solid out there that would fill the void, create a sense of flight, of getting out of the oppression of self.

We don't want to do it; we want to be it. Only we don't know it. No one tells us.

From An Improvised Life: A Memoir by Alan Arkin

This passage so beautifully brings alive the ecstatic urge at the core of all art and spirituality, and reminds me that in many ways, especially in Western culture, art is a refuge for the secret mystic in the human heart. When the urge to “be the music” is so strong that it breaks through the strictures of existing religious or monastic institutions, we Westerners become poets, artists, musicians, actors, comedians, and filmmakers.

India has its traditions of sadhus, avadhoots, devotees, gopis, and masts—each of which are words for a distinct breed of passionate mystic seized so powerfully by the music of the divine that they break with the buttoned-down conventions of householder living. These life choices are traditionally accepted and honored in India.

But in the West, there’s no such mystical tradition—inside the box of our social conventions, souls who are overtaken by the need to “be the music” generally express that longing through courting the ragged, ungovernable muse, that primal source of “the music” we long to be.

Evolution is creative in a distinct, but related sense: In the life-and-death struggle with changing life conditions, life and consciousness are always improvising, always pressing into uncharted territory. Scientific materialists often describe this process reductively, as if it were simply the way we stay alive and thrive. But Integralists see Eros, that creative self-transcending drive, expressing itself in every biological, behavioral and noetic innovation.

In this time, our crises call for our creativity. But let us not be confused by the seriousness of our evolutionary challenges and begin to imagine that the process is grim. It is intrinsically ecstatic, rooted in delight, in playfulness, in an erotic urge to be “the music” itself — because that is the nature of life, and of evolution, and of that-which-thrives.

Practitioners of Integral spirituality recognize that ecstatic urge as our nature, our birthright, and the healthy expression of every human heart. We resonate with these memorable words from Abraham Maslow:

The key question isn’t 'What fosters creativity?' But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

When we’re being that which we recognize as beauty and truth and goodness, we simply allow our true nature to shine forth. And often, that looks like “creativity.” We often dream and imagine and play and entertain and joke and sing and draw and exclaim.

And, what's more… we delight in the presence of that music in one another.

Part of what excites me about ISE3: Harnessing the Power of Your Evolutionary Creativity is our vision of a We-Space in which we’re letting our music resonate.  By this I mean that celestial, primal music that we all are non-conceptually attracted to simply “be.”

We have an opportunity this year to create a We-Space in which we’re delighting in one another’s creativity, opening to our shared and unique playfulness. We will gather, bringing dreams, consorting with our muses, swooning back into “beginner’s mind”, and from that open space, tenderly witnessing the lovely silences and green shoots of new expression.

We intend to beckon people from all over the world who want to share their urge to “be” the creative-mystical “music,” who care to let go of whatever obstructs the flow of creativity.  We’ll share our gifts—both our creative appreciation and our co-creative generation of the elusive essence of it all — as the mysterious translucent aliveness that is always sending shoots up through the cracks in the concrete sidewalks of the world, sometimes in forms we call “art” and sometimes as “mystical awakening”, and even sometimes as “God-Realization.” Please join us! 

Terry Patten Terry Patten co-developed Integral Life Practice with Ken Wilber and the core team at Integral Institute, and was the senior writer of the book, Integral Life Practice. With Integral Spiritual Practice, he leads people step-by-step into a life of heart-centered evolutionary unfoldment. He hosts the acclaimed online teleseminar series Beyond Awakening: The Future of Spiritual Practice. Terry speaks and consults internationally, inspiring, challenging, and connecting leaders and institutions worldwide. His personal web sites are gobeyondawakening.com, theispcommunity.com, and integralspiritualpractice.com.           More with Terry Patten:           Integral Life Practice: Enough Talk, It's Time to Live! Terry Patten and Ken Wilber                     The Upward Tilt: A Creation Myth by Corey W. deVos           Three Steps to God: Awakening Your Evolutionary Creativity by Marc Gafni           The Creative Trajectory by Sally Kempton